Get to know Illustrator

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Welcome to the Get Started with Illustrator series of tutorials that teaches you the basic tools and techniques of Adobe Illustrator CC. This first tutorial introduces you to the Illustrator workspace and shows you how to open and save your images.

There are a lot of ways to begin a new project in Illustrator CC. You can create one from scratch, start from a template, open an existing file and more. Let's look at how to create a new document to start. With the latest version of Illustrator CC open, you may see this start screen which appears when no documents are open. Yours may look different and that's OK. From the start screen you can open existing files and create new files. Whether or not the start screen is showing, you can also always go to the File menu at the top of the screen to open existing documents or to create a new document. Now to start a new document from scratch, choose File, New... The New Document dialog box appears and once again, yours may look a little different than what you see here and that's OK. In this dialog box, you can start by choosing a preset option like Print, Web or Mobile. So, it's important to know before you start designing what type of project you're creating. In this video, you'll create a document for a poster that's meant to be printed, so, click Print to show a series of print document presets. When you choose the Print preset, other settings like the type of color used and the units of measurement are automatically set to accommodate a print project. After choosing a preset, you'll usually choose a document size. Now, there are several options to choose from within each preset. By clicking View All Presets, you can even see additional sizes here. Select Tabloid and know that if you choose a preset size like Tabloid, you can always change the size and all the other options after the document is open. You may also see a series of templates in the New Document dialog box available from Adobe Stock. These templates can be a great way to learn how Illustrator CC projects are built, and they can be used to jump start a project. On the right side of this dialog box, you'll see a series of options you can set for the document. Now, most of the time, we won't have to set all of these options but let's look at some of the options you'll set most. Click to highlight the name and change it to Poster. You don't have to change the name here but when you save the document later, this name becomes the name of the file. Click Points and from the menu that appears choose Inches. These are called the document units. Later when you want to measure something or look at a ruler, this is the measurement unit you'll see. Now you can customize the Width and Height of the document and change the Orientation by clicking one of these options. The Orientation is actually the direction in which a document is displayed or printed. Click Landscape so the document is now landscape or horizontal orientation. Artboards you see here are similar to pages in a program like Adobe InDesign CC or Microsoft Word. You start with one artboard in your document, but you can add more here. You can also do that after the document is created. Now these are just some of the options you can set to set up the document before you get started. You'll become more familiar with the different options the more you work in Illustrator CC. Since we've set the basic options we need, click Create to create the document. The new document opens in Illustrator CC. To ensure that you can see the entire artboard or page, choose View, Fit Artboard in Window. Once the new document is open in Illustrator CC, you can change the documents settings you set when you created it. In the Properties panel to the right of the document, if you want to change the units for instance, you can click the Units menu. To change the size of the artboard, you can click Edit Artboards to enter Artboard Editing mode. You can choose a preset page size from the menu in the Properties panel. So, I want you to go ahead and choose Letter. You may need to scroll up in the menu that appears. You can change the Orientation and a whole lot more. To stop editing these artboard settings, you can click the Exit button towards the top of the Properties panel to exit Artboard Editing mode. Creating new documents in Illustrator CC is something you'll likely do a lot. There are many different options to explore when you set up a brand-new document. When you're just getting started in Illustrator CC, keep it simple and know that you can edit document settings, like the artboard size, later on, the more familiar you become with them. To close this file, you can go up to the menus at the top of the screen and choose File, Close, without saving it.

What you learned: Illustrator workspace

Menu bar (at the very top) shows the File, Edit, and other menus that give you access to a variety of commands, adjustments, settings, and panels.

Tools panel (on the left) contains tools for creating and editing artwork. Similar tools are grouped together. You can access them by clicking and holding a tool in the Tools panel.

Panels (on the right) include Properties, Layers, and other panels that contain a variety of controls for working with artwork. You can find a full list of panels under the Window menu.

Document window (in the middle) displays the file you’re currently working on. Multiple open documents appear as tabs in the Document window.

Learn how to zoom and pan

Explore how to zoom and pan in an Illustrator document.

To help you become more familiar with Adobe Illustrator CC, let's take a tour. To start, you'll open an Illustrator CC document. With Illustrator CC open, you can open a file by choosing File in the menus above, Open... In the Open dialogue box, navigate to a file you have, or you can open this practice file from the downloadable practice files for this tutorial, then click Open. After opening a document, you'll usually want to make sure that you can see all of the document content. To do that, choose View, Fit All in Window. With the file open, you'll see the Illustrator CC workspace. Now the workspace is made up of an open document in the document window you see here. The menu is above, the application bar below the menus and on Windows, the menus are in the application bar, the Tools panel on the left and finally docked panels, like the Properties panel you see here on the right. As you explore in Illustrator CC, you'll find that you can move parts of this workspace to have things you use all the time easily accessible or maybe to show more of the artwork you're working on and fewer tools and panels. So, let's explore the pieces that make up the workspace. In the Tools panel on the left, you'll see tools you can use to create and edit your artwork. Some of the tools have a little arrow in the corner which means there are more tools you can choose from. For instance, press and hold on the Rectangle tool here to show more tools you can choose from. Click to select the Ellipse tool and notice that the menu of tools is now hidden, and the Ellipse tool is selected. Come back to the top of the Tools panel and click to select this Selection tool. Now, this is a tool you'll use a lot to do things like select and move content. Come out to the document and click in this rectangle to select it. Now suppose you want to change the color of this rectangle. If you look in the Properties panel to the right of the document, you'll see options available for the content you select, like its Position and Size, Appearance properties like the Fill color here. Let's try changing the color of this object. So, click the Fill color and select another color to fill it with. You can then press Escape to hide the Color panel. You'll also see some Quick Actions down here. These options change depending on what's selected. You can even click underline words like Stroke to see even more options. You can then click away from the panel to hide it. Now, the Properties panel is docked on the right side over here with a few other panels called the Layers and Libraries panels. If you want to see the layers or how the content in the document is ordered for instance, you can click the Layers panel tab at the top to show the Layers panel. To show the Properties panel again, click on the Properties panel tab. If you find that you need more space in the document window to work on your document, you can click the arrow at the top of the docked panels to collapse them. This will give you a little more space to work. To show the panels again, you can click on a panel name to show the panel, and then click on the tab or panel name to collapse it, or you can click the arrow at the top of the docked panels again to show them all. Now, there are actually a lot of panels in Illustrator CC for you to explore. Each contains different options and they can be opened from the Window menu up here. Any panel that has a checkmark is open and currently showing. You can see the Properties panel has a checkmark. Let's open another panel. So, choose Align to open the Align panel group. A group is a series of - in this case three panels - and you can see each panel has a separate tab. This group is called free floating because it's not docked with the other default panels on the right. You can move them around by dragging the title bar at the top. You can also dock one or more of these panels on the left or right side of the workspace by dragging it into place. So, let's dock the Align panel on the right. Drag the Align panel by the tab onto the panel tab names docked on the right. When a blue highlight appears in the Properties panel group here, release the mouse button. The panel is now added to the group. To close the remaining panels left in the group, click the X in the corner. At some point as you open, close and rearrange a lot of these panels, you may want to reset them to their original locations. To do this, you can reset the entire workspace. In the application bar above the document, click Essentials and choose Reset Essentials to put all of the panels back to their default locations. Now, if you see something else chosen in this menu, choose Essentials first and then choose Reset Essentials. As a last step, you're finished with this practice file, so you can close it by coming up to the menu bar and choosing File, Close, without saving. Now that you're familiar with the Illustrator CC workspace and how to manage panels, going forward you'll be able to more easily organize panels in a way that complements your working style.

What you learned: Zoom and Pan

TheZoom tool, located in the Tools panel, can be used to show you more detail of a document. To change from Zoom In to Zoom Out, press Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS).

The Hand tool, found by clicking and holding the Zoom tool in the Tools panel, allows you to pan across a document.

Create a new document

Learn how to make a new document.

Being able to get around in your documents in Illustrator CC by zooming in and out and moving between artboards will make it much easier to create and edit your artwork. So, to get more comfortable with navigating in your documents, you'll explore how to zoom in a document and then you'll learn how to move or pan in the document window. You can open one of your own Illustrator CC files or this file from the practice files for this tutorial. Now, when you work in Illustrator CC, your content is on artboards. An artboard in Illustrator CC is similar to a page in Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign CC. In this particular document, you'll see a series of artboards. You can have a lot of artboards in one document and they can also be different sizes, maybe to design a postcard and a poster for the same client in a single document, which makes it easier to share assets and colors and different things across the different pieces you're creating. The first thing you'll do is select some artwork. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel on the left and click on artwork in this artboard. Once you do that, you should see a subtle black line around this particular artboard. That line tells you it's the active artboard or the one that you're currently working on. To fit the active artboard in the document window, choose View, Fit Artboard in Window. This can help you focus on a particular artboard in your document. Now, suppose you're working on content on this artboard and then you realize you need to edit artwork on another artboard. You can do that by panning or dragging within the document window with the Hand tool. So, in the Tools panel on the left, press and hold on the Zoom tool and select the Hand tool. Press and drag in the document window to move around. It's kind of like moving a piece of paper on your desk but digitally. To see all the artboards and the artwork again, you can choose View, Fit All in Window. When working with more detailed artwork, sometimes you want to zoom in or make things appear larger. You can do this several ways. We'll will begin by using the Zoom tool. First, let's make sure that nothing is selected. To do that, choose Select, Deselect. To select the Zoom tool in the Tools panel on the left, press and hold on the Hand tool and select the Zoom tool. And come out into the document window and to zoom in, click once. Where you clicked is now in the center of the document window. Try clicking a few more times to zoom in closely. Now in the lower left corner, you should see this View menu. This is where you can see the current zoom level and also choose a different zoom level, all the way up to 64000% to zoom in really closely to detailed artwork. From this menu, choose 100% if it isn't already selected, so you can see the artwork at 100% of its original size. Now to zoom out which makes your artwork appear smaller, so you can see more content at once, with the Zoom tool selected, press the Option key on Mac or Alt key on Windows. You should see a minus sign in the Zoom tool now. Click a few times to zoom out. Eventually, if you click enough times, you'll zoom out far enough to see everything. When you are finished, you can release the key. You can also use the View menu to zoom. Select the Selection tool again and click to select this logo. To zoom into the logo, choose View, Zoom In. It's just like clicking with the Zoom tool right on that logo. It's zooming in by a certain amount and centering the logo in the document window. So that you can see everything in your document again, choose View, Fit All in Window. Being able to navigate your documents by panning and zooming will be really important when you're working in Illustrator CC, it'll allow you to see more detailed artwork up close for instance or even take a step back to view the entire document.

What you learned: Create a document

The Start screen appears when there are no documents currently open in Illustrator. It lists your recent files, Learn content, and presets. You can also access various resources and search Adobe Stock from here.

Choose File > New. In the New Document dialog box, start by choosing a preset. For example, the Print preset shows various sizes and document options you can set for a new document. The New Document dialog box is where you can access free and paid Adobe Stock templates, which are a great starting point for your designs.

Save your work

Explore the different methods for saving your Illustrator projects.

When you create a new file or make changes to an existing file in Illustrator CC, you'll need to save your work. Let's look at a few different ways to save. If you want to follow along, you can open this document from the tutorial practice files. With the file open, let's make a change to the artwork out here. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel and click on this piano icon to select it. To remove it, press Backspace or Delete. Now, in order to save this newly edited file, you can come up to the File menu up top and click Save. But in this case, you'll save a copy of this file, so you can keep the original intact, essentially giving it another name by choosing Save As... So, go ahead and choose Save As... in this File menu. On the Save As dialog box that opens, you can choose a different location to save the file if you like. I'll keep it in the same folder. Change the name maybe by adding a hyphen and a version number at the end, like this. That way you make a copy and also keep the original file. Make sure that Adobe Illustrator (ai) is the chosen format. We actually save and work in Adobe Illustrator CC files because everything is preserved so you can edit it later as you need it. Then click Save to save a copy of the file. And whenever you save a file for the first time or you save a document as a copy, you'll see this dialog box after saving. This dialog box can seem a little overwhelming. The settings you see in here actually allow you to save an Illustrator CC file in a format that can be opened in earlier versions of Illustrator CC, among other more advanced options. In many cases, you can simply click OK which is what we'll do now. So, go ahead and click OK to save the file. In order for someone else to open and view the Illustrator CC file you just saved, they'll need to have Illustrator CC. And if they can open a file with Illustrator CC, they can probably edit it. At times you may want to just send a visual copy of your file that anyone can view. You can do that by saving your document as a PDF. Now, to save your document as a PDF, go to the File menu up top, choose Save As... again. In the Save As dialog box, this time you can choose Adobe PDF (pdf) as the format. Anyone with a free PDF reader can view this. In this menu, you also see other formats including Illustrator EPS (eps) which stands for Encapsulated PostScript. EPS is a vector format for printing to PostScript printers and image setters. You'll also see an Illustrator Template (ait) which is one way to save an original Illustrator CC file and always open a copy of it. And finally, a few versions of SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics which we can use to save Illustrator CC artwork for use on web sites and more. To save this file as a PDF, choose Adobe PDF (pdf). You can choose another location if you want and click Save. In the Save Adobe PDF dialog box that appears, you can customize the options for the PDF you create. You can choose a preset, from the Adobe PDF Preset menu up here depending on what the PDF is for. For instance, if you're going to post this PDF on a web site, you might want to choose the [Smallest File Size] option. You can also select a category from the list on the left and customize those options as well. For now, leave all the options at their defaults and click Save PDF to save the file as a PDF. The PDF file is now open in Illustrator CC. Now that you understand how to save and what options are necessary, you can be sure to save your files early and often. Saving a file right after creating it ensures that it's saved your system and is available later. Saving often saves the last state of the file also ensuring that you can continue editing where you left off.

What you learned: Save a file

Choose File > Save or File > Save As.

Saving in Illustrator (AI) format retains layers, type, and other editable Illustrator properties. It’s best to save your document in the .AI format while you’re still working on it.

The Illustrator Options dialog box appears when you first choose File > Save or File > Save As. This dialog box offers other options when saving an Illustrator document.

Choosing File > Save As and choosing Adobe PDF saves as a file that can be shared, opened by free PDF readers, and posted online.